Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [101]
My body sagged against the couch. Blood thundered in my ears, and when I found my voice it was a raspy whisper.
“What are you talking about? I was . . . we got...” Divorced, I wanted to say, but Bettina started talking first.
“I hired a detective. I knew you were a liar the first time I saw you. I just didn’t know how bad it was.”
I managed to straighten the pile of pages into a stack. My hands were steady under Bettina’s glare, and my eyes were dry. “Your father didn’t know about any of that. All he knew was that I loved him.”
“Some love,” said Bettina. “How could he have loved you? He didn’t know what you were.” She smiled at me, a horrible, humorless grin. “You thought you’d waltz in here and fuck him to death and get everything. Well, you were wrong, Samantha. You’re not getting shit. I’m going to tell everyone.” She crossed the room in three swift steps and snatched the folder out of my hand. “Everyone. I’m going to ruin you.”
The door slammed shut. I was alone.
I sat for a minute, shaking, numb, breathless, forcing myself to think. What could she do to me? And what would it matter? I’d lost my love. I hadn’t lost my home yet, but that would be coming soon. And there’d be a baby. A baby and no Marcus. In that moment, I was eighteen again, eighteen and trapped and terrified, with no resources, no family, eighteen and barefoot on the black-and-white tiled floor of my first husband’s apartment, shaking so hard that the plus sign on the pregnancy test between my fingers was a blur, and the only words I could think were I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.
In the dressing room, I flipped through the hangers until I found the jeans I wanted, a pair left over from my pre-Marcus life, dark-rinsed, worn through at the knee. I put on one of his T-shirts—freshly washed and folded, of course, but I imagined it still retained the ghost of his scent, his cologne and his skin—and a soft gray wool cardigan on top. He is gone, I told myself. He’ll never come through the door again, never kiss me in bed, never pull out a chair for me at dinner, never pull my head into his lap while we’re watching TV. He’ll never see our baby. I can’t, I thought, with the frantic desperation I’d felt as a teenager, all those years ago. I can’t.
Our luggage was kept in specially built shelves along one of the closet’s shorter walls. I took a duffel bag, a simple thing made of coffee-colored leather. It took me ten minutes to fill it up with jeans and T-shirts, underwear and bras, a set of workout clothes, a pair of sneakers, a toothbrush, and a comb.
In the media room, I sat at Marcus’s desk, flipped open my laptop, and logged onto the travel site I used. There, I bought a direct flight from Philadelphia to Puerto Vallarta, leaving the next morning. A ticket from Newark to Los Angeles, leaving an hour later. From Boston to the Bahamas. From LaGuardia to Vancouver. From Hartford to Paris. My fingers flew. The telephone trilled. Fraud protection. My friends at American Express were concerned about suspicious charges. I assured them that the card was in my possession, that all of the charges were legitimate. “Is there anything else I can help you with today?” the pleasant-voiced customer service representative asked, and I told her, nicely, that I was all set.
I bought myself three more tickets—Frankfurt, London, and Lexington, Kentucky. Then I picked up my bag, hailed a cab, and slid into the backseat. “Newark airport,” I said, and started to run.
PART THREE
Then Came You
BETTINA
I don’t understand,” I said, for what felt like the sixteenth time that morning. I was sitting at a table in a conference room in my father’s office with Jeff, my father’s lawyer, at my side and my father’s baby, with her wrinkled rosebud of a face, in a car seat on the floor beside me. I could have left it—her, I reminded myself, her—at home, with the doula, but I wanted her with me as a kind of visual punctuation, a reminder to the assembled attorneys of what had happened, and the situation I was in.
On the other side of